Peabody award winning Director, Joseph Lovett tells this story with a very personal appeal as he reveals his diagnosis of glaucoma, a disease that robs 4.5 million people worldwide of their vision.
Our Press Kit includes materials and resources for outreach partners.
Joseph Lovett is an award-winning filmmaker, whose films have informed, engaged and inspired people into action. After working at ABC News 20/20 for ten years as director/producer, Joe founded the company in 1989. During the 1990s, Joe produced, in partnership with the Centers for Disease Control and ABC, In A New Light prime time specials, a 5-year AIDS awareness campaign that flooded the CDC’s AIDS hotline with an unprecedented number of calls. In 2001, Joe won a Peabody Award and received an Emmy nomination for writing, producing and directing HBO’s Cancer: Evolution to Revolution. The film was the focus of a national public health campaign, which described it as “150 minutes of television that could save your life” and launched a national conversation about coping, treating and learning to live with the realities of cancer. His highly acclaimed feature, Gay Sex in the 70s, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, was released theatrically in over 25 cities, and broadcast on the Sundance Channel in 2007. Joe’s latest film, Going Blind, and its Outreach Campaign, Going Blind and Going Forward, have ignited a global movement of individuals, grassroots organizations and medical professionals sponsoring screenings to raise awareness and to improve access to vision enhancement services. Other broadcast films Joe has directed and/or produced include The Way Home, a one-hour special on forgiveness for the Hallmark Channel; State of Denial, a film on the AIDS crisis in South Africa; and Too Hot Not to Handle, an HBO film on Global Warming. Over the years, Joe has been honored with numerous awards from advocacy organizations, including the AIDS Leadership Award, the Christopher Award, and the Kitty Carlisle Hart Award.
Hilary Klotz Steinman has been an independent documentary filmmaker for over 15 years. Hilary won an Emmy for co-producing The Pill, about the history of the birth control pill for American Experience. She won a Christopher Award as co-producer on Episode One of the PBS series Slavery and the Making of America, and received an Emmy nomination for research on the Bill Moyers’ PBS series Becoming American: The Chinese Experience.
The achievements of the film and its outreach campaign were made possible by many generous contributions from our funders. Funding has been fully tax-deductible through arrangements with the IFP, our 501-C3 fiscal sponsor.
Production Funding:
Pfizer Ophthalmics
Reader’s Digest Partners for Sight Foundation
The Gibney Family Foundation
Allene Reuss Memorial Trust
National Eye Institute
The Allergan Foundation
Fred A. Lennon Charitable Trust
Rudin Foundation
May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation
Reid Williams Foundation
Glaucoma Optometric Society
James & Ellyn Polshek
David Duplantis
Richard and Kathleen Levin
Outreach Funding:
Reader’s Digest Partners for Sight Foundation
The Sarah K. de Coizart Charitable Trust
The Allergan Foundation
The Gibney Family Foundation
Olcott Family Foundation
Bloomberg Foundation
The Teubert Foundation
Gill Foundation
Evelyne Balboni
Reid Williams Foundation
James & Ellyn Polshek
The Beuth Foundation
Drew & Jessica Guff
Major Individual Donors:
James & Ellyn Polshek
Evelyne Balboni
David Duplantis
Richard & Kathleen Levin
Barbara & Barry Coller
Drew & Jessica Guff
Carol & Lawrence Saper
Lorenzo & Stanley Weisman
Robert Feeney
William and Gloria Paul
